


Contingency Plans: Aftermath

by hypatia



Series: The Incredibly True Adventures of 2 Hackers in Love [9]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Drug (sedative) mention, Gen, Gratuitous Movie References, How to keep secrets inside an intelligence agency, In-Jokes, Mobility Aids, Network Security, Q's cats - Freeform, R's POV, Suicidal Ideation, Veteran!Q, fake suicide, office gossip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:40:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24446740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypatia/pseuds/hypatia
Summary: R asked the question that had been bothering her all day. “M? Why did you think Q would obey an order to kill an agent?”
Series: The Incredibly True Adventures of 2 Hackers in Love [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1568371
Comments: 14
Kudos: 81





	Contingency Plans: Aftermath

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place between the events of _Contingency Plan: Mission_ and _Contingency Plan: Debrief_. (Some of the action was described from Q's point of view in _Debrief_.)
> 
> While this is part of a Leverage crossover series, there are no references to Leverage in the fic, so I did not tag it.
> 
> Thanks again to Zandraeliox for beta reading!

**Friday evening**

“007! Report!”

R heard Q’s voice take on a desperate edge. She had been working on a project and only half-listening to Q bantering with Bond. She looked over to his workstation where his monitor displayed an expanding fireball on a loop in one window, and a blurry image of what might be the exterior of a building, on fire, in another. A third window, which _should_ have shown agent 007’s vital signs, was dark.

“Q,” she said. “Ready to assist.”

He glanced over his shoulder at her and nodded gratefully. “Monitor emergency response; we need to know if there are any survivors. There were already police on the way for another incident, start there. I’ll review security feeds in the vicinity for any sign of Bond after I inform M.

“Moneypenny?” he said, his voice back to its usual even tone. “Please put me through to M. We have an agent presumed down… M? Yes sir. I’m afraid so. Bond’s watch was still broadcasting vital signs when it detonated. It appears that the timer may have gone off prematurely. I will need to do some testing to determine whether there was a flaw in the device or an error in the field.

“Yes, I’ll keep you informed.” Q broke the connection and turned to R. “We’ll need a team on-site as soon as possible. R please coordinate with Moneypenny. If Simmons is available, please include her; she has forensics experience that may be valuable.”

**Monday morning**

Q had been in all weekend trying to determine what had gone wrong with Bond’s mission. He’d handed every task he could possibly delegate over to her and then R had watched him pursue too many variables, too many dead ends. They couldn’t even confirm Bond was dead because of a stupid paperwork error at the morgue where his (presumed) body would have been examined.

It wasn’t that she agreed with Moneypenny that the solution to Q’s obsessive focus on what went wrong was to drug him. But she wasn’t certain she disagreed either. On the rare occasions he emerged from the bunker he’d taken over, he’d looked haggard, exhausted, and desperate. It was grueling to watch and he refused any offer of assistance.

R had watched surreptitiously as Moneypenny fed him breakfast and he realized what she’d done. She’d expected anger or shock when he realized what had happened. The flash of fear she saw instead would haunt her later.

But for the moment, she covered him in a blanket, made certain he was comfortable on the couch in his office, and ran Q-branch for the day as she had since Bond’s presumed death. When he woke that afternoon, he refused to speak to her, just scowled and headed for Moneypenny’s office.

**Wednesday morning**

R arrived at 0825. She settled in at her workstation and checked that her boss had actually left the building last night as he’d promised Moneypenny. She didn’t see a security scan for him arriving this morning. He was usually in by now, though heavens knew his hours had been erratic since Bond had—well.

She checked her email and saw a message from him timestamped 0800. The subject line simply read “My apologies”.

She opened the message. It had also been sent to M, Tanner, and Moneypenny. There was one line of text for each of them, and a single link to a video. Her message read, “You’ll probably hate me for this,” a line Q had used rarely and, as far as she knew, only when talking to her. It meant, “I’m giving you shit-work. I know that it is shit-work. But it is very important shit-work. There’s no one else I trust with this.”

She put her headphones on and clicked the link. She did not notice that agent 008 had come into Q-branch behind her to return his equipment, watched over her shoulder and left just before the video ended.

When the video ended, she locked her computer, removed her headphones, and tried not to run to the test bunker Q had been using for the past few days. The door handle was hot to the touch.

Tanner found her staring at the door two minutes later. “It’s true then?” he asked.

She looked at him, eyes bleak. “It’s still hotter than an oven in there. It could be hours, even another day, before we can get in.”

“M was on a call; he’s cutting it short and will want to talk to you as soon as possible.”

She nodded.

“Did you have any idea…” he began.

She squeezed her eyes shut. “If I’d thought he would do anything like this, I’d have dragged him to psych and tied him to a cot myself.” She groaned. “Oh God. What am I going to tell the staff?”

Tanner looked grim. “For now. Nothing at all. If there’s any guidance you need to give them on _ongoing_ missions or projects, do that now. Then grab your things and meet in M’s office. We may be some time.”

“Right,” she said. “Give me 10 minutes.”

“Did you give him that order?” R asked, without sitting down. M looked as grim as Tanner. R had never seen Moneypenny look quite so stunned.

M ignored the question. “What do we know?” he asked her, waving her to a seat.

She sat, fuming. “Not much more than you do at this time I expect. We’ve all seen his…” her voice broke for a moment, “…suicide note, from last night.” They nodded. “The bunker he was using is currently too hot to enter. If he was aiming for cremation temperatures, that would be around nine _hundred_ degrees Celsius. There may be a way to dissipate heat faster, but at the rate it has cooled so far, I’d say it will be late tonight or early tomorrow before we can safely enter. Though it seems fairly clear what we’ll find.”

M frowned. “I don’t think we can be so sure. Is there any chance that this is some sort of ruse?”

R drew back, shocked. The idea hadn’t occurred to her. In the video, Q had looked so _done_.

“I suppose there’s always a chance. Not enough to go on yet,” she said. “Either way, when we can get in, we’ll need help from a forensics team. Q-branch has some knowledge in that area, but we’ll want outside expertise.”

M nodded and Moneypenny made a note.

Tanner looked uneasy, “We’ll need a communication plan. And if we’re investigating whether he’s faked this, we’ll need to carefully select who receives that information. Different levels. Some Q-branch personnel will have to be part of a search for him, others will suspect he’s dead or missing soon whatever we say. Rumors are going to start flying shortly _if_ they haven’t already.”

M nodded. “We can start by telling staff that Q didn’t arrive at work today and hasn’t responded to various attempts to contact him. Each of you give me a list of staff you’d trust to find him if he’s faked this and who could be discreet about doing so.”

“His badge scanned out yesterday evening, about half an hour before that video was created and sent,” said R. “I’ll start by having someone check security for anomalies.”

“When was the last time you saw him in person?” Moneypenny asked.

“Shortly after lunch yesterday I think,” said R. “I’ll check with other staff when I give them the news that he hasn’t checked in.”

“So, he could have an eighteen to twenty-hour head start on us,” said Tanner. “That’s a flight anyplace in the world. He could be anywhere.”

“He couldn’t fly without an accomplice,” said M. “Which is possible and an avenue we’ll have to pursue, but my money is on ground or sea transport.”

“He’s really that averse to flying?” asked Moneypenny.

“Yes,” said M. “The previous M compelled him to fly a handful of times. It involved sedation to the point he required a minder. She left notes recommending I not ask him to.”

Moneypenny raised an eyebrow.

R knew her boss well enough to ask, “What exactly did he threaten to do?”

“Blow up any plane they tried to put him on,” said M, grimly. “Whether or not he was already aboard.”

“He actually threatened to kill himself and _civilians_?” asked R, surprised.

“Christ no. He wouldn’t fly in civilian aircraft at all. Wouldn’t tolerate anyone but an RAF pilot and swore he’d inform any potential crew ahead of time. His predecessor and mine apparently had something of a row about it.”

R nodded. That sounded more like him.

“When was his last psych evaluation?” M asked Moneypenny.

She checked her tablet. “As far as I can tell, he hasn’t had one since he joined. The system says M—both of you—signed off on his missing it each year.”

“I bloody well did not,” grumbled M. “All right. Moneypenny, I’ll need you to compile the list of staff who can work on this, review existing response plans, and begin prioritizing tasks for both the possibility that he’s dead and that he’s gone rogue.”

R noted he didn’t mention plans for when a senior staff member might have been coerced or suborned. That answered her question about whether M had given Q that order.

M continued, “Tanner, your first priority is a communication plan, then coordinate with Moneypenny. R, I’d like you to take a pair of agents and go to Q’s flat. See what you can find,” said M. “Beware any traps.”

“M, his stated reason for killing himself was that he didn’t want to kill an agent. The idea that he would then turn around and attempt to harm or kill agents searching his flat is ludicrous.” R said impatiently.

“Nevertheless, be careful please.”

“Yes, of course.”

R arrived at the flat with two agents in tow. They’d been told they were doing a ‘wellness check’ on the quartermaster who had not signed in to work today and wasn’t responding to messages. She had brought with her several tools she might need to get in through whatever security he might have. She presumed it would be formidable.

An agent preceded her down the hall and stopped in front of Q’s door. It had a numeric keypad. R wasn’t familiar with the design, which suggested Q had built it himself. There was a folded piece of note paper taped to the door. It was marked “R”. The agent passed it to her.

The note read:

R,

I’m not an idiot. But I’ll pretend to be one in order to make this easier for you.

— Q

“Q, you bastard,” she muttered, stifling a laugh that she knew could all too easily become hysterical. She reached forward to punch in the code.

The agent caught her wrist. “Ma’am,” said the young woman. “Please move back down the hall. If you give me the code, I’ll punch it in.”

R sighed impatiently but complied. “The code is one.”

“One,” said the agent.

“Two.”

“Two,” the agent repeated. R snickered, caught herself and coughed.

“Sorry, it’s… if it were an option, I’d kill him,” she muttered. “The code is one, two, three, four, five.”

The agent stared at her in disbelief. “What, really?”

“It’s the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage,” quoted R, leaning against a wall and wondering whether she was about to sob or laugh hysterically, perhaps both. “Haven’t you seen _Spaceballs_? It’s a classic.”

The other agent held up his hand and gave her an understanding nod. The young woman continued to look at her blankly. “There’s a comedic bit about how terrible people are about passwords,” she explained. “It was a running joke in Q-branch. We said it whenever we hacked someone who never changed the default admin password or set it to something dead simple like ‘password’.”

She waved a hand to the agent, who entered the code and the door unlocked with a series of soft clicks.

They entered the flat, which at first glance was unexpectedly bare. It felt like a place someone was either just moving into or out of. Nevertheless, she had the uncomfortable feeling of being in someone else’s space uninvited.

All of his electronics were in a plastic bin: personal laptop, tablet, game consoles. The pantry was empty, but two bags labeled ‘Donate’ stood on the countertop nearby. The refrigerator had been emptied and cleaned. She instructed one of the agents to take photos of everything in the flat and the other to put the electronics in their vehicle to be brought back to Q-branch for analysis. She expected to find nothing of use on any of it.

She entered the bedroom, feeling even more out of place. There was a note on a door she presumed led to a bathroom. It read: ‘Cats Inside’ and had a small doodle of a cat poised to spring. Two cat carriers stood next to the door.

He’d done some packing in here too. A bookshelf stood empty with a few boxes next to it. The bed was stripped and the bedding had all been laundered and folded in a basket. A stool placed near the dresser seemed a bit out of place, but the only truly unexpected items were a pair of forearm crutches in the closet and a cane resting against the wall next to the bed. He clearly hadn’t intended to return.

She returned to the main room and asked the two agents, “Are either of you good with cats?” she asked. “They’re in the bathroom, which I should check, and I don’t want them getting loose.”

The agent who had seen _Spaceballs_ said, “I can help with that. I’m Connor, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Connor.”

Between the two of them, they managed to get R into the bathroom and not let either of the cats out. Q had left them food and water for several days. There was a self-cleaning litterbox in one corner of the shower area and a cat bed next to the sink.

The bathroom layout was unexpected. The shower was accessible, the tiled space simply an extension of the floor with no lip and a gentle slope toward the drain. There was a shower chair and grab bars were installed in several places.

Connor assisted her in exiting the bathroom without a feline stampede.

She called Tanner. “Nothing much to find here,” she reported. “He’d done some packing and cleaning. All his electronics were in a plastic tub ready for me to take back to HQ.”

“I suppose it would’ve been too much to hope for that he’d leave us some unambiguous clue.”

“Or he felt that video said it all?” she asked.

Tanner grunted.

“You know he had two cats, right?”

“Yes?”

“Moneypenny mentioned you’ve been thinking about getting a pet for your children,” she said.

“Yes?” repeated Tanner, rather more suspiciously.

“They’re quite adorable, but my son is allergic and Moneypenny is a dog person.”

Tanner sighed. “I should be able to take them, just need to warn the spouse.”

“Excellent. You’ll want a couple of analysts to look through here just in case I’ve missed something. I’ll assign someone from Q-branch to assist on the chance he left something for us to find.”

“Thank you, R. I’ll let M know.”

R glanced at the agents with her and sent Tanner a text: _Need an explanation soon. This lot at least may assume he’s_ _scarpered. Or figure out what’s up. It’s tidy in a... meaningful way_ _._

Tanner’s response arrived almost immediately: _acknowledged_

The four of them reconvened in M’s office a half hour later.

“The only things I didn’t understand were the mobility aids,” said R completing her report. “Crutches and a cane, grab bars and such in the bath.”

M looked puzzled. “Don’t imagine he keeps the prosthetic leg on all the time. Bathing and such,” he said. Then looked more puzzled when the other three just stared at him. “What?”

“Prosthetic leg?” asked Moneypenny, bewildered.

M nodded. “Lost a leg in Afghanistan? Plane shot down in Kandahar?” he looked from face to face. “This means nothing to _any_ of you?”

Moneypenny looked dismayed. “Is _that_ why he was afraid to fly?”

“Of course,” said M. “Why else?”

R interjected, “Q was not particularly—free—with personal information, sir.”

“Surely you noticed he limps if he’s been on his feet for several hours?”

“He made a comment about a war wound once,” said Tanner, shaking his head. “I assumed it was a joke. I didn’t even know he’d served.”

“We’ve rather gotten off topic, but yes. Q is a combat wounded veteran who served four years in the RAF. Retired as a flight lieutenant. He was the sole survivor of a plane crash. Among other injuries, he lost a leg below the knee. My predecessor found out about his skills and recruited him out of hospital while he was recovering.

“R, you asked one of your staff to check security footage in Q-branch. Any findings?” asked M.

“Yes. There is evidence of tampering. The footage of Q leaving for the evening appears to have been copied from earlier in the day and the CCTV footage of him leaving the building loses him one camera away from our building. Again, it appears to have been copied from earlier in the day. His badge swipe is recorded, but not from a physical device. This occurred approximately thirty minutes before the timestamp on the video he sent. I would say that he tried to make it look like he’d already left, perhaps in case Moneypenny and I were watching to make sure he did.”

“Tanner, Moneypenny, what do we have for a communication plan?” asked M.

“Tomorrow, once we’re able to access the bunker, we will put out that it appears there was an accident. We’ll have a contingency plan in place depending on what rumors start circulating,” said Tanner.

“What about the two agents who accompanied me?” asked R.

“Advised to say nothing about what they’ve seen while we investigate the possible disappearance of the quartermaster,” said Tanner. “I trust their discretion.”

“And staffing for a manhunt?” asked M.

“I’ve prepared a list,” said Moneypenny. “R, you probably know him best. I’ll ask you to brief them on any personal details that might be useful in a search.”

R sighed. “Today I learned I didn’t know the first thing about him,” she said softly. She refocused and turned to Moneypenny. “Sorry. Yes, of course, I’ll put something together.” She made a note on her tablet.

“What’s next?” asked Tanner.

M paused. “For the moment, I think we need to assume that he is still alive, and potentially a threat. Moneypenny will notify allied intelligence services to be on the lookout for someone fitting his description. We’ll monitor ports of exit and entry and see what we can find. R, what do we need to do in order to secure our networks?”

R blinked and let out a breath as if she’d been punched in the stomach. “That would be a challenge…” she began.

“I presumed so. How soon can you do it?”

“M, I need to make sure you understand the scope of what you are asking. You want me to tell you how we would keep a man, who may have been one of the _best hackers in the world_ , out of a network that he architected, that uses security protocols and code that he had a hand in designing.

“In brief, it is possible that we _cannot_ secure it. If he were alive, we could replace every piece of code he ever touched and every device he used and we might not get him out. Even if we did, I couldn’t guarantee that we’d keep him out.

“Sir, I could blow a seven-figure hole in your operating budget and we could still be vulnerable. Or, we could be chasing a ghost and waste every penny of that and never know for certain.”

“Where would you start?” asked Moneypenny pragmatically.

R thought for a moment, then sighed. “We start with perimeter defense. Everyone has a mandatory password change _today_. We lock out any of his known access. We reconfigure our firewalls. We compare user IDs to actual headcount and make sure there aren’t any unaccounted for. That gives us a better chance of detecting intrusions and we already do all those things on an unpredictable schedule, so it won’t look too unusual for most of the staff.

“We’ll reassess network classification levels, verify isolated or air-gapped systems are still…” R watched M’s eyes glaze over slightly and Moneypenny suppress a smirk. She restarted. “There are precautions we can take,” she said, “we’ll assess and reassess our needs over the next few days.”

“But I should point out,” R continued. “That no intrusion and undetected intrusions are identical from our perspective. Plus, we have people trying to hack us all the time. If there _is_ a successful intrusion, it won’t necessarily be something we could trace back to Q even if it were him.”

“Considering his stated reasons, do we know Q didn’t first help Bond fake his death?” asked Tanner.

M looked grim. “We don’t,” he said. “Unless new evidence has surfaced in that investigation that I’m not aware of?” he looked at Moneypenny, who shook her head.

“Nothing substantial. Though this makes the paperwork error that led to the cadavers’ early cremation look more suspicious.”

Tanner’s eyes widened and he stared at the ceiling for a moment. “So, our exposure is somewhere on a continuum of both a senior agent and our quartermaster are dead or two of the most dangerous men in the world have almost simultaneously gone rogue and we have no idea what their intentions might be. Were they sleeping together?”

“No,” said R and Moneypenny simultaneously.

“How can you be sure?” said Tanner. “They flirted on comms all the time.”

“Because Q clearly wasn’t interested,” said Moneypenny.

“Q flirted with 007 on comms for the same reason he swore at 006 in multiple languages, memorized sport trivia for 005, and talked to 009 like he was a naughty schoolboy. Because that was what kept them grounded during missions,” said R. “Don’t ask me what any of his comm chatter with 004 meant. Might as well not have been speaking English at all.”

“All right. Not shagging, but perhaps gone rogue together, nonetheless. What kind of damage do we estimate they could do?”

“End western civilization?” asked Moneypenny under her breath. The other three stared at her. She rolled her eyes, “Didn’t mean to say that out loud, but am I wrong?”

“I think,” said R, “whether or not he’s still alive, if Q had intended to damage MI6, he would have done so. His mission preparation style was meticulous planning that allowed for efficient, surgical strikes. He didn’t draw things out. The longer and more complex the mission, the more risk he perceived. There were always contingency plans, opportunities to back out, fail-safes everywhere.

“Whenever possible, his targets were out of the picture before they knew a strike was coming. He thought telegraphing an attack was a _sucker move_. I’d say the best evidence that he wasn’t out to cause further harm is that we’re not sitting in the dark or staring at smoldering rubble right now.”

Tanner nodded grimly. Moneypenny looked thoughtful. M looked more dubious.

R pressed on, asking the question that had been bothering her all day. “M? Why did you think Q would obey an order to kill an agent?”

M looked confounded by the question. “Because he is a ruthlessly efficient killer with a higher body count than all the 00s combined?”

“Ah,” said R, seeing where this was leading.

“What?” asked M.

“Sir, he was a ruthlessly efficient killer _on behalf_ _of_ his agents. Any risk he could sweep out of their way, he did. With, you may wish to note, remarkably little collateral damage. He accepted blood on his hands if it kept agents from shedding _theirs_.”

“The number of remote assassinations has quadrupled since he became quartermaster,” said Moneypenny, “that doesn’t seem particularly hesitant to me.”

R frowned. “But that’s exactly my point. Any mission that could be completed remotely didn’t require risking an agent at all. He did everything in his power to protect agents in the field. There was _nothing_ more important than that to him,” she looked accusingly at Mallory. “And then he was ordered to kill one of them.

“I’d prefer to think he’s alive, but you saw him in that video. That wasn’t an act. MI6 had betrayed him and he was _done_.”

Several grueling hours later, R stopped up at Moneypenny’s office. “Eve. We’re going out for a drink. Or three.”

Moneypenny scowled. “Thanks to your boss, I have hours of work yet.”

“And it will be there later or tomorrow. We’re going out for a drink. We’re going to toast my boss, damn him and his dramatic exit, and tomorrow we’ll be back and in charge of MI6.”

Eve looked around, cataloging everything she had to do. She grabbed her purse.

“He could rip us to shreds,” said Eve morosely, folding and refolding her cocktail napkin into small triangles.

“You know he’s gone, right?” asked R gently, watching the other woman closely. “You saw his face in that video.”

“M thinks otherwise.”

“And how long do you think he’ll be willing to keep chasing a ghost? Spending resources that we need for missions?” she sipped her cocktail and continued to watch.

“Why would he make it so hard to prove?” asked Eve, leaning back against the wall and staring at the ceiling.

“Given the way he tidied his flat, I presume he didn’t want us to have to deal with a corpse.” R shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ll know more tomorrow, but I expect he never intended to leave us an unambiguous case. Maybe he was okay with us wasting resources for a bit.”

“I thought he just needed a rest and some perspective,” said Eve wretchedly.

“Eve. Losing seven hours to an unexpected nap didn’t change his plans one iota,” she held her drink, swirling the remaining liquid around thoughtfully. “He had this worked out—probably to the second—just like any other operation he planned. He would have had fail-safes and contingency plans for every possibility. His opsec was impeccable, _as usual_. You can’t blame yourself for not seeing something that he wasn’t going to show you.”

“He was acting calm and rational after he woke up, but I knew he was furious with me, and terrified, and I couldn’t tell why. Anger I understood. The fear didn’t make sense.”

R nodded. “I saw a flash of it when he realized you’d drugged him. He was afraid we’d figure out what he was doing. He spent nearly a decade avoiding psych like the plague, I presume he had a reason, and we could’ve landed him there if we’d looked more closely.”

Eve nodded. “I got his psych records from when he served,” she said.

“And?”

“After he was injured, he threatened or attempted to kill himself, it wasn’t completely clear. He was on suicide watch from shortly after he was rescued until he arrived back in London. And he had a panic attack on the transport plane to England and had to be sedated. There was a lot of technical jargon that amounted to ‘Not unexpected with a near-fatal plane crash, life-changing injury, probable PTSD, and survivor’s guilt’. The shrink’s notes recommended that he get regular counseling, make strong connections, and find _meaningful work_.”

“And then Mallory threw nine years of service back in his face with that order,” said R. “Medical sent me a list of identifying marks.” She sighed and sipped her drink. “As if he’d left anything much to identify. The list of scars was harrowing.”

Eve winced. “Did he at least have any amusing tattoos?” she asked hopefully.

R looked up, her eyes threatening to fill with tears. “Sorry,” she said shaking her head, and wiping her eyes. “He did have a tattoo, on his left bicep. The RAF badge surrounded by the silhouettes of four reconnaissance planes—in missing man formation.”

“Shit,” said Eve, closing her eyes for a long moment. “I teased him about his fear of flying,” she said, poking at the ice in her drink with her cocktail straw. “Thought it was just him being eccentric.”

“If he’d wanted you to stop, he’d have told you so,” said R, hoping it would be reassuring. “He wasn’t shy about _that_.”

“He didn’t trust any of us. Did he?”

“Apparently not,” said R.

— I don’t know what form this would actually take, but we all know the 00s have some secure communications channel that HQ doesn’t know about, right? —

**Wednesday morning**

**8:** Q’s dead.  
Blew himself up in a bunker using watches like the one that got 7.

 **2:** Oh god

 **3:** Are you sure?

 **4:** Oh no

 **5:** What?!

 **6:** Christ

 **9:** Shit. No.

 **8:** No one’s talking  
I’ll report back when I know more.

**Wednesday noon**

**8:** Only official word is he didn’t clock in today and hasn’t answered messages.  
They can’t access the bunker he was using to test what went wrong.

 **6:** Can’t access?

 **8:** R was talking about heat dissipation with a couple of staff.  
The numbers were… cremation temperatures.

 **2:** God. He incinerated himself, didn’t he?

**Thursday morning**

**4:** They’re saying they think it was an accident  
8? What do you know?

 **8:** I saw a video he sent but didn’t hear the audio  
I’m shit at lipreading, but that was clearly a suicide note.  
He looked exhausted. hopeless. But he was also furious. There’s more we don’t know.  
Young Connor said his flat was tidy, mostly packed, electronics in a bin for R to retrieve.  
Chief is adopting his cats.  
Accident doesn’t explain any of that.

**Monday afternoon**

**3:** M doesn’t believe he’s dead.  
Told me to sharpen my knives, just in case.

 **9:** He told YOU that

 **3:** He did.  
Seemed to think our comms chatter meant we didn’t get on

 **4:** Instead of being a years-long in-joke?

 **3:** So it would seem

 **4:** Clearly you’ve been discreet

 **6:** Hold up 3  
You and Q…?

 **3:** Hah! God no.  
Just friends  
We drank beer and played video games together about once a month.

**Wednesday afternoon**

**5:** Now they say suicide. Because he screwed up 7’s detonator. Him?

 **9:** He was mother hen enough that I could buy guilt over a mistake.  
But an error with explosives he gave an agent? Nope.  
Something’s not adding up. Not with what 8 saw.

 **6:** More than one thing

 **2:** 6? What do you know?

 **6:** Not even on this channel.

 **3:** Right

 **4:** Got it.

 **8:** Copy

**Author's Note:**

> A note on the 00 agents who appear at the end. I've cast a couple of them in my head, but the rest, who you'll meet in a bit more detail soon, are a bit more nebulous.
> 
> 006 of course, is Sean Bean as Alec Trevelyan  
> 004 is played by Kate Beckinsdale  
> 008 is played by Idris Elba
> 
> Edited to remove a timeline discrepancy 11/22/2020.


End file.
